quarta-feira, 23 de novembro de 2016

Trotsky, os negros e a «vanguarda»

According to Breitman, Trotsky was a particularly strong advocate of this:

Quote:"To show his American comrades how he thought revolutionists should react to the oppression of the Negroes, he denounced the prejudiced white workers in more scathing, more bitter terms than any American Marxist, black or white, had ever done; even in his Black Muslim days Malcolm X never used harsher language. It is unrealistic, he said, to expect the Negro to reach ‘a class point of view’ ahead of the white worker; that can happen ‘only when the white worker is educated’ (class-conscious and anticapitalist), and understands his duty to his black brother. Despite that, the oppression of the Negroes is such that they can become revolutionary ahead of the white workers, furnish the vanguard of the revolution, and fight better for a new society than the white. But, he added, for that to happen, the revolutionary party must carry on ‘an uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions [Black Nationalism] of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers and makes no concession to them whatever.’ "

Trotsky’s attitude was reflected in a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party Convention, an arm of the Trotskyite Fourth International, in New York City in July, 1939. It began:

Quote:"The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary element of the population. They are designated by whose historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution." [The SWP and Negro Work]

Trotsky also wrote:
Quote:"It is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that white missionaries, preachers of eternal morals, participated in the corruption of the Kaffirs…No, we prefer the Kaffirs to all missionaries… The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites… The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race." [Their Morals and Ours]